2 cases tagged “florida true crime”
Subject: Casey Marie Anthony
On July 15, 2008, Cindy Anthony called 911 in a panic, telling the dispatcher that her daughter Casey's car smelled 'like there's been a dead body' in it. Her granddaughter, two-year-old Caylee Marie Anthony, had been missing for thirty-one days. Thirty-one days Casey had spent partying with friends, sleeping at her boyfriend's apartment, and getting a tattoo on her shoulder that read 'Bella Vita': Beautiful Life. She had told anyone who asked that Caylee was with a nanny named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez. The nanny did not exist. When Caylee's skeletal remains were found in December 2008, less than a mile from the Anthony family home, duct tape near the child's skull, the case exploded into a national obsession. What followed was one of the most polarizing murder trials in American history: a courtroom battle over chloroform, swimming pools, family secrets, and the limits of reasonable doubt. On July 5, 2011, the jury delivered a verdict that left much of America stunned. Casey Anthony walked free. The question of what really happened to Caylee Marie Anthony has never been answered in a court of law, and it likely never will be.
Convicted: Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen
At 5:25 on a March morning in 1986, Joyce Cohen called 911 from her Coconut Grove mansion and told dispatchers that burglars had shot her millionaire husband four times in the head while he slept. Then she kept police waiting outside the house for more than eight hours. It was the first of many decisions that would define the rest of her life. The story of Joyce Cohen is a portrait of poverty survived and luxury squandered, of a woman who clawed her way from foster homes in Illinois to the highest rungs of Miami society, only to watch it all collapse in a single pre-dawn hour. What followed was a nearly three-year investigation, a sensational trial, a jailhouse informant who failed three polygraphs, and a lead detective who privately believed the whole prosecution theory was wrong. Joyce Cohen has maintained her innocence for nearly four decades. She is in her late seventies now, housed at Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida, with a parole board having pushed her release date to 2048. The mansion is gone. The Jaguars are gone. Stanley Cohen has been in the ground since 1986. And the full truth of what happened that night may never be known.
